Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
robinoula.com
robinoula.com
For what it's worth, I looked it up (thanks linkedin) and the author of this piece spent four years at some place called Linfield College in McMinville, Oregon, getting a BA in History, Philosophy, French and German. It's possible that her personal experiences may not generalize.
"Our higher education system largely fails to educate... It’s nothing less than a deep institutional, cultural, societal and indeed humanitarian crisis."
Really? I could have sworn that I learned a bunch of stuff about physics and pure mathematics in my four years of intensively studying physics and pure mathematics, but maybe I'm just crazy.
College offers the opportunity to do what you did and work your ass off, but most have no such desire.
Do you disagree with my claim? It may be a generalization, but by no means an overgeneralization.
Hacker News users aren't exactly a representative sample of the population anyway (generally educated, probably middle class or higher and if not middle class, we probably have above average drive ambition).
Secondly, just because someone passes classes doesn't mean they're educated. I had friends who pumped and dumped for tests and couldn't remember any of it the next semester. Other people learn outside of school and we have no way to measure or give credit for that.
Clayton Christensen talks about the disruption of Harvard Business school in his book -> http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating-Sustainin...
You can't compare everyone to an 'elite' anyway. It's statistically unfeasible. We need critical thinkers who have a thirst for knowledge. Some people don't have the latter. Especially people who think they are already educated. Those are things we need in our society and a degree doesn't guarantee that people have them. Although we wish it did.
One of the "great successes" of Indiana education lately (scare quotes to denote its Potemkin aspect) is the satellite campus in the city in which I live of a certain state university, which has recently been augmented with a new satellite campus of, um, another certain land-grant university. (Hi, Mr. Google, nothing to see here.)
Party of the first part itself has never been much to write home about (and that alone would back up the grandparent), but party of the second part in particular is shamelessly exploiting the lack of a viable local economy by selling degrees with the promise of "careers". The people in that program are utterly disinterested in learning anything at all that someone here at HNN would consider an "education" (after all, they just want jobs; they don't care how, and if someone will sell them a job, they're happy to pony up the money, but they don't see why they should go through the rigamarole of learning math and stuff) - and they will be graduating with a degree in engineering from said Indiana land-grant university which is rather well known for its engineering program. (That is, the commodity they're selling is - for now - worth it.)
I don't want to get too much more specific or even identify my source of information, but let me assure you that - even though I don't consider this universal in American education - I do consider it probably rather typical, because if Indiana is doing something, I know damn well we didn't originate it.
The people going through this program know nothing about math or engineering. Nothing. You probably think that's hyperbole. Let me assure you that it is not hyperbole; they know so little math that you would honestly not be able to accept that a member of H. sapiens is capable of knowing so little math. They're simply paying for the piece of paper that they're told will get them a job, and nothing more. If too many in a class fail, ways are found to make sure that those students still get their credits. The paramount goal is to sell degrees, no matter what, and to present the facade of dynamic growth.
I want to stress at this juncture that this is not the DeVrie Institute or some other commercial educational organization - these are well-known, fairly well-respected, state universities. They're not Harvard, but the engineering school in particular is a good one, especially in aerospace. The degrees they are selling are good names. But they're selling them, cash on the barrelhead. I remember perfectly well when a new president was hired at Party of the First Part University with the motto of running the school like a business, and this is the result.
Now, I'll grant you none of this is data, it's anecdotal, from an anonymous source, and hopefully not too easy to Google, and I've omitted worse allegations that I believe to be true - I live here, after all, and know these people, and I can't prove any of it. But it's all too real. If you want to deny it, fine; that's certainly your right. But OP is far more on target than you seem to be comfortable with.
Overgeneralization = The source of this ire seems to me to come from the idea of "hey, it wasn't long ago that a degree could guarantee me a job. Now not so much. Let's posit why." Although, I seem to remember that was the tone of the movie Reality Bites some two decades ago. So clearly, this isn't the first education bubble.
This might be an unfair representation; there is, of course, intrinsic value to many people in pursuing a career that they're passionate about, and it's becoming increasingly the case that college is seen as having instrumental value. In the minds of many, though, college is still seen as more inherently valuable, and the arguments against going to college are just making us more and more capitalistic, at the expense of culture, education, and whatnot.
Observing the dialogues over the last few weeks it seems that the participants all define being "educated" differently. But they are not establishing their perspective before stating their cases.
In other words, folks aren't declaring and initializing the variable before proceeding with their functional logic.
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
Let community colleges serve their purpose. University studies should be for serious students capable of academic work.
I brought up my score in this because it's the comparison most relevant to me.
I'm sorry, are you under the impression that you were a smart twelve-year-old for some reason other than that you happened to draw some good cards from the gene pool? Feeling superior to others for being smarter is like feeling superior to others for being better-looking or having richer parents. It's just dickish. (edit: or perhaps I should say it's normal, but best kept to yourself lest folks think you're a dick)
It's my opinion that university admissions are way to lenient
If you are going to play the game where you mock those whom you consider to be intellectually inferior it's best to master the difference between "to" and "too" first.
I'm actually not trying to mock others. I simply believe that university standards should be a lot harder because schools could teach many subjects a lot faster and the investment of time and money from the students would be much better spent.
Regarding "to" versus "too" - I was on an airplane with a fair bit of turbulence so I'm surprised that's my only mistake.
I got a lot of downvotes for what I said and granted I could have said it a lot better, but a system where every individual goes to college is completely broken unless university bound students are much better prepared in terms of critical thinking ability, mathematical ability, reading/writing skills, and study habits than they are today.
From the provided citation, it seems that the 75% SAT score is 1200 without the new writing section. That would be 200 points above the standardized average, which means that your point that most of the school exhibits poor academic performance is patent bullshit. It may not be MIT, but Linfield College surely has its place and it is certainly not your place to throw your weight around like you're Scott Aaronson and claim that the college is incapable of academic work. Go out and do something worthwhile instead of insulting strangers.
For the record, I have not taken the ACT but I have taken the SAT, the GRE and the Stanford-Binet IQ test. My scores on each were high enough that they render the tests virtually meaningless when it comes to measuring my "intelligence." They have no more measure of "intelligence" than my golf handicap or mile time have of my "athleticism."
Steve Jobs never graduated college. I would still take his opinion on education. This is an argument that can be logically debated without having to go to credentials.
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory. -- Leonardo da Vinci
http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=argumen...
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Leonardo_da_Vinci
Edit: I retract that last bit. Quoting someone isn't necessarily arguing from their authority. But it almost certainly isn't Leonardo.
The words are more important than where they came from. I don't have much respect for authority in the first place. I would just rather spend more time debating actual arguments than arguing about credentials.
RE: Leonardo - Well until we find out who said it, I'm attributing it to him. I don't throw away theories until they're disproven.
Really? Let me ask you a few questions, then. When was the American Revolution? What are the electrically charged parts of an atom? How does central banking work? How do red blood cells bind to oxygen?
If you will only accept as fact information that you have personally verified, you will know a very small collection of facts. The sensible thing to do in many cases is to appeal to authority: the collective opinion of experts in a field.
Heck, even in one's own area of specialty, one can't know everything. I can't personally evaluate every possible programming language or database in the world before choosing something; I take a clue from common opinion and narrow my search from there.
Really, this is one of the things that makes civilization possible.
Want to take advantage of being able to spend four years learning from some of the best minds in every field of human endeavour? Four years set free on hundreds of possible courses, millions of available books, and hundreds of professors willing to answer (well-posed) questions about their work? It's easy to go into a Bachelor's and come out knowing a lot of great stuff.
On the other hand, if you want to put the minimum of energy into getting your Bachelor's degree by picking the easiest subjects and doing the minimum of work to get through them then, yeah, you can come out of the university without knowing much at all. That's partly the university's fault (they really don't flunk nearly enough students nowadays) but mostly your own.
"But", you say, "couldn't I just spend four years in the library and learn all that stuff anyway for slightly less (once opportunity costs are taken into account) money?" And the answer is: probably not. Books + lectures + professors will teach you much better than books alone. The big enemy when learning from books is not the stuff that you don't know, it's the stuff you think you know that's wrong, because you misunderstood something the first time (it happens to all of us, sometimes books are unclear) and never got corrected on it. (This is why you'll find that the internet is full of self-taught physicists who are disproving relativity or thermodynamics because they've misunderstood some aspect of it).
It's telling that many of the folks who are pushing the "we don't need no education" meme are programmers by trade, since programming is one of the very few skills that you can learn effectively on your own by reading books. Why? Because it's easy to know when you're wrong: it'll result in your code not having the desired effect.
If the average quality varies that much, we should be paying a lot less for it.
High prices (in general) imply a level of quality. They don't necessarily indicate quality, but you're not paying a lot for no reason. If the quality from a BMW was highly variable the price would need to decrease to account for that level of risk. In education the student takes all of the risk and pays a high price for it.
The challenge is that many people bring exactly this consumerist attitude to tuition, which then ruins the signalling capacity of the price. "If it's expensive, it must be good." That pushes up demand for enrollment and increases the selectivity and reputation of the university in US News, etc. The university therefore has an incentive to keep tuition high. Unfortunately, then students and parents think, "I'm paying so much for this degree, I should (get A's/not flunk out/...)" [1] Professors who grade rigorously are evaluated harshly; since most instructors aren't tenured, there's no incentive for them to make classes challenging. Then many employers use the earned degree as a crude signal of diligence, since what was actually learned is likely irrelevant to the job at hand.
Finally, most families send only a handful of children to college, and there's a significant lag between when graduates and the evaluation of the "success" of the degree. There's no way tuition can accurately price the variation in outcomes with all these inefficiencies.
I would say that programming is one of the few high-paying professions that many can break into without certification. There are a lot of skills that can be learned via self-study if one is willing to go beyond books, but the problem is one of certification.
Living in Beijing, I regularly meet people studying Chinese on their own as well as those with 4 year degrees in Chinese, often from prestigious schools. Most of the best speakers I've known have been hobbyists who are interested, rather than people who simply followed an academic track at an institution. However, with no certification, it's a bit tough for some fully bilingual self-taught people to get the nice translation jobs. I won't name any names, but I've seen some high profile work done very poorly by a PHD who had credentials to get it.
Other than foreign languages, writing in one's own tongue is also not largely linked to an expensive 4 year university. Neither are business, popular music or theater. I would also say that math is largely vulnerable to self-study. I've made considerable progress in the visual arts just from my own efforts and youtube.
Other than extremely expensive research sciences what else requires a university to learn effectively?
You say that so dismissively, like Universities only have a little bit of that kind of thing.
She would be making the appeal to authority, except she doesn't even bother to do that. She just appeals to common sense ("you don't have to be an economist to... etc").
Edit: perhaps I should say any of her good points are overshadowed by (and mostly unrelated to) the blatant exaggerations and generalisations.
Yes, Steve Jobs is a real-world success. He obviously did not feel the need to finish the college, and took a deliberate decision to do so. His opinion on education certainly would have a different angle and substance that would be worth hearing.
But that is because of the reasons stated earlier he is qualified to opine on the subject matter, the same cannot be said for everyone.
PS - I did not read the article so cannot judge, how qualified the author is to make a opinion of this matter. But the comment is generally applicable, anyhow.
I may defer to experts on radiation in Fukushima, but education is a philosophical argument. Even the experts aren't really experts on it. Can we describe the difference between good and bad teachers yet? Not really. Degrees do not protect anyone or any institution from criticism.
Jobs said he wanted to finish college, but couldn't afford it. He's definitely pro-learning. The author was too. Our society is getting very defensive about an educational system that is failing its citizens.
I do not imply to say, "Everyone should drop out of schools, because steve jobs did, and see.. he is successful". My thoughts were more along the lines of, "Even though we have our belief's, lets hear this guy out, because he is successful and _smart_ and _took a decision_ on the subject matter, and we might learn something interesting from his observations on the subject matter."
All sides are just as vulnerable to this.
University students don't become experts in anything. For a non-technical subject, the knowledge gained isn't really going to beat a normal member of the public with an interest in the subject. English literature students, for example, just leave with some long essays under their belts, they don't graduate as well-read authorities on different epochs of literature. For technical subjects, I suspect most the skills learnt are forgotten afterwards.
It's just too easy for people to coast by, or cheat. The astonishingly low pass marks in some courses have the added effect that the bright students don't need to really get on top of their game to get a good grade. So most people who graduate are far from experts on what they were learning about. As in, if a member of the public needed any of those skills/knowledge to do their job, they could acquire them privately without much difficulty.
You're absolutely right. A bachelor's degree is supposed to be a mark of well roundedness, not specialization.
> English literature students, for example, just leave with some long essays under their belts, they don't graduate as well-read authorities on different epochs of literature.
They're not supposed to be authorities - if they wanted to dedicate time to become authorities, it's well understood that you'll have to specialize in English lit, likely in some kind of subfield, which is what a masters/PhD is for.
> As in, if a member of the public needed any of those skills/knowledge to do their job, they could acquire them privately without much difficulty.
That doesn't necessarily mean that University education is all for naught. University education purports to teach us how to be better thinkers, not necessarily produce people who are skilled in one kind of thing.
The latter definition that I gave above is what the article is trying to defend.
That would certainly make you an expert on your subject. Not a leading academic, obviously, but someone very well informed and educated on the matter. Of course, none of that really happens. Students do the minimum number of essays required (one, instead of three). They don't bother reading the books except the really short ones and the ones they need to write or present on. They barely even attend the lectures for the modules they did choose. Basically they finish having accomplished a fraction of the learning that was supposed to take place. Really no better than the average person who reads a lot of books.
That might be true, but of course the "average person who reads a lot of books" is not even remotely average. Most people don't read a lot of books, so if college were to make an average person nearly as knowledgeable as self-motivated individuals interesting in spending their personal free-time reading books, as opposed to watching American Idol, it is pretty successful.
What is "well-roundedness" and why is it a good thing? I went to a good school, and I was forced to take all of the worthless general requirements that had nothing to do with anything I cared about. The only thing I still have from those classes is debt. Most people I know tell me that they've had the same experience I did.
I usually refer to David Foster Wallace's graduation speech (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html) given to the class of 2005 at Kenyon College.
A serious question: Have you ever, since you graduated, wished you knew more about a topic outside the field you got your degree in? Why? Ever wish you had more background in economics, history, politics, or science so you could have more informed opinions on the news or make better choices in your life or at the voting booth?
Now, imagine you could go back and take a good intro course in some of those fields of interest, instead of the "worthless" ones you had. Would that kind of "well-rounded" be more satisfying?
Why not let people be "well-rounded" in a field of their own choosing? We don't insist that every college applicant learn Greek and Latin anymore. Following this further, I can't think of a justification for insisting on any particular requirement at the university, other than to ensure that every graduate should complete a certain number of credit hours with some minimum average course difficulty level. If someone wants to study nothing but chemistry, physics and math, why get in their way? Who is anyone to get in the way of someone who knows what he wants? For those that don't know, how is telling them what they want a legitimate answer?
I've personally taken a couple of film and English classes when I didn't need the credits - it doesn't help me one bit in my career, but at least it had helped me think of things in a different way than what I'm used to.
It's a shame, because understanding differentiation and integration has had a tremendous impact on the way I think. It literally was a gamechanger for me, and it's worth it even though I only use it in thought exercises now.
I've also seen people look up formulas in a book, and misapply them with no understanding. The formulas are understandable if you know calculus, but these people would get answers that didn't work and would just be befuddled.
The funny thing is, though, I did a lot better on the AP exam than the kids who did take a calculus class, the same class I would have taken if I'd finished the prerequisite class in time. And, after a semester of taking it in a class, I'd pretty much lost interest.
("more or less": This was in high school. I failed to put in much time on it during the summer, since I was busy traveling to Japan and falling in love, so I signed up for "study hall" as an elective, and spent that time studying calculus with a textbook. The structured time without much distraction was very helpful in making it through enough of the book to do well on the exam.)
What are some other topics that you very rarely see people learn other than by schooling? Machine learning, physics, surgery?
Through Thomson, Maxwell, and others, the general mathematical theory of potential developed by an obscure, self-taught miller's son would lead to the mathematical theories of electricity underlying twentieth-century industry.
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Green.ht... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Green
I think I have learned myself a decent amount of calculus.I suggest anyone interested in self learning calculus to to try Infinitesimal Analysis first as its more intuitive. Epsilon delta becomes easier after. And for differential calculus, consider implementing a Higher Order Multivariate Automatic Differentiator able to deal with Jacobians and Hessians efficiently. That hands on learning helps a lot.
So, when it comes to getting a job, I don't think school has really given me any advantage over someone self educated, because I feel largely self educated anyway.
As a side note, one of my professors used to be in charge of hiring at a fairly large company and started refusing to hire (for the most part) anyone with a 4.0, claiming all the good engineers were in the 2.8/3.8 range. He found that GPA was a metric for jumping through hoops, and not engineering ability/critical thinking/creative planning etc. I agree. Of course, I'm one of those 2.8/3.8 students, but I've seen so many cases where the best in class cheats, sucks up, or memorizes the material for the test and immediately forgets it. There's actually a kid famous for being a dumbass in my school, but he's head of IEEE, and has a cushy IBM job lined up, even though nearly everyone agrees he knows nothing about his major.
The claim I’m most confident of: school is mostly not about the material taught in classes. I’m less sure to what extent it is about learning-to-learn, coming-to-obey, bonding with other kids, and signaling these features as well as intelligence and conscientiousness. I’m pretty sure signaling of various sorts is at least 30% of the average private value of school, and it could go as high as 80%.
More interesting discussion can be found here:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/functions-of-school.ht...
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/04/kling-on-school.html
Also, an interesting post by economist Bryan Caplan:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/08/bill_dickens_ve....
So it becomes a brand-name game. You pay for the brand, you spend some time getting indoctrinated (most likely to how important this particular brand is) and you get your piece of paper.
Somebody said once that the purpose of education is to create new habits. So, for instance, if you are an English speaker and develop a habit of reading a good Russian novel once a year, that might be an excellent habit to have. Or if you develop a habit of reading a dozen computer books a year, or perhaps you develop a habit of cross-checking politically-slanted stories you agree with. And so on.
Lots of great habits that you can form. Some subset of these constitute what we call "critical thinking," which everybody seems to think is important. There are a bunch of entrepreneurial habits that I'd love to make sure folks had. If you want a job after college, developing great people, marketing, and networking habits would be awesome.
But I don't think anybody wants to seriously start talking about what habits college graduates should mostly exhibit. To do that would cause controversy. Colleges are very much dependent on public dollars (at least in the states) and I don't think they are ready for the political firestorm that would occur once you start actually trying to define the thing that we're all paying for.
It's not a bubble, except for the part about more and more money goes for less and less return. The problem is that there is no "thing" that is being returned. There's no bad guys here, but it's much more like a con: you pay increasing amounts of money for this intangible thing where there's no real way to determine if what you got was what you wanted. You don't really know if it's worth what you spent, because the seller is purposely keeping you in the dark about the value, continuing to assure you that this type of purchase at these rates is absolutely necessary. In fact, as time goes on they get more and more insistent that this thing is absolutely necessary -- at any price.
That kind of building up of expectations, then jacking the price, then delivery of something that could roughly be considered what was needed but isn't enough, repeat-and-rinse, is much more indicative of a con (Disclaimer: I don't mean to imply intent here, and I also don't mean to imply outright fraud. Just trying to find the best metaphor. I also realize that I am making a large generalization, and all generalizations are false. Caveat Emptor.)
To nearly every professor I've met, the criteria should be something similar to this: A student is introduced to a wide variety of subjects and challenged by a variety of views outside of the cultural bubble in which the student was born; such so that an undergraduate student leaves better prepared to participate in educated society and make wise decisions in civic and public discourse. Secondly, a student has been immersed in a discipline to the extent that they can read and understand literature in the field, and that student can apply the training in learning one field to conquer further fields in their future life outside of academia.
In other words, the goal of college is to create a "well-rounded" individual who has "learned how to learn" and has "seen the world past the one in which they were raised."
Now, how do we operationalize this? Note that Doctoral students have comprehensive exams and dissertations. Colleges are obviously not averse to testing. A multiple choice exam isn't going to cut it here, though.
I am rather iffy on this idea, it seems like an excuse for indoctrination. More often than not, the "views outside of the cultural bubble in which the student was raised" turn out to be "the professor's own views", with other other views getting sorely neglected.
edit: It also arrogantly presupposes the professor's intellectual environment to be less bubble-like than the students'. Anyone who has spent time around professors knows this is unlikely to be true.
Education usually blasts away many natural preconceived notions about the world. It makes engineers run tests and scientists run experiments. What better way is there to get people to question their own knowledge but by showing them other viewpoints?
It also arrogantly presupposes the professor's intellectual environment to be less bubble-like than the students'
I think the professor's intellectual environment is a different kind of bubble. Maybe it's a higher level of dogma, but we need students to believe in themselves while simultaneously understanding that what they believe could be wrong.
In some cases, agreed. However, in other cases, it seems to do just the opposite: it seems to introduce new or enhance pre-existing biases and philosophies. From my perspective, it appears to happen most often with the so-called "soft" sciences, and most especially in things like literature and gender/race and non-mainstream sexual studies. There's very much a cult-like aspect to some academic fields, making them have more of the characteristics of a religion than of science.
Don't get me wrong, math and the hard sciences certainly provide extremely important and foundational knowledge, but the prevalence of egotism and nerd machismo in these fields is as obnoxious to me as the flakiness that can be found in 'softer' fields.
Alas, I agree that it's all a big ripoff anyway. Just another entrenched, obsolete business model waiting to be put out of its misery.
But some uninformed people believe many things that are factually unsupported (vaccine myths, economic myths, etc). These are not things that educated people argue about. People who argue without any factual or reasonable theoretical basis do not better our society.
The point is that the student is exposed to multiple viewpoints, and gains experience interacting with various arguments. That even includes weird things like queer theory (which I must say, makes a lot of sense as a gay man. I can't say how much it would relate to someone cisgendered and straight.)
The fact that professors may live in their own cultural bubble isn't a problem so long as they are competently presenting views to are new to the students.
The primary goal is to develop the tools necessary to critically examine any incoming view. Not to simply be exposed to some representative panoply of views. Any such array of views will inevitably be incomplete (due time, if nothing else) and the evenness of their presentation inevitably open to challenge.
So if failings of variety or fairness in presentation are deal-breakers, we're essentially throwing out any possible real-world examination of such topics, regardless of the particular bent of a particular professor or institution.
> You don't really know if it's worth what you spent, because the seller is purposely keeping you in the dark about the value, continuing to assure you that this type of purchase at these rates is absolutely necessary.
This isn't like buying a car or a house. My degree has no monetary value, as far as I can tell. I'd love to sell it to the highest bidder, but it's non-transferable. I essentially purchased a license from my university. This license (read: degree) entitles me to say that I completed a program there.
The seller isn't keeping me in the dark. I got exactly what I was promised: the license to say that I completed sufficient coursework for the school to confer a degree upon me.
The license does not explicitly certify that I have any knowledge. It simply does not make that claim.
At the end of the day, the degree is simply a license to add another line to my resume. What's that worth to me? I guess it's up to society to decide, but so far it's not been worth very much for me.
Personally, I think that I would have been better served using the money in almost any other way.
In my opinion, there's already a term for all this debate around the education 'bubble': "Buyer's remorse".
Half of it is buyers' remorse, the other half is sour grapes. There are three types of people in the world: those who went to university and are glad, those who went to university and regret it, and those who didn't go to university and want to be reassured that they didn't miss anything important. Only folks in the latter two categories are writing articles on this subject. (Oh, and the occasional embittered professor who thinks things aren't nearly as good as they were in his day.)
Consider this: I have a degree, so it's in my economic best interest to try and inflate the importance of that degree in the job market. I can do that by trying to raise the status of my school (see: alumni donations) or by putting down those without degrees (see: degree requirements for jobs). In practice, I'm so disgusted by the entire system that I don't have any desire for my degree to have importance.
This strange thing that's happening is that people with degrees aren't defending them nearly as vigorously. I think the reality is finally setting in that having a degree is not a good discriminating factor for employment. This is awkward to the large group of people who only sought a degree for better career opportunities. Like angry rioters, one possible (though perhaps illogical) course of action for the degreed-but-unemployed might be to tear down the facade of the degree.
Conversely it is in the interest of people who do not have a degree to deflate the importance of the degree in the job market?
I don't have a college degree, and I'm glad I don't as that would have been waisted time -- but I had to interview people, and the quality of people coming from a certain university in my city is much higher than the rest of the bunch.
I even go as far as thinking that there might be something wrong with people not having a degree, so I definitely bring the point up in interviews.
But a degree can also work against you. If the quality of a university is known to be poor, the candidate would be better off not mentioning it in resumes. So it's definitely about branding.
People complain about the unfairness of the latest trends in regards to contributions to open-source, which look really good on people's resumes. But a portfolio of works released to the public works much better for software developers that a shitty university. On the other hand, whenever I hear MIT or Berkley, my eyes lighten up.
So having (or not) a degree depends on lots of factors.
Ouch, talk about a bad time to make a typo ("waisted")
And not that I don't appreciate a good spanking, but I really dislike grammar Nazism and ad-hominems.
I think this is a vast overstatement. As a potential employer, it's in my best interests to have colleges create the best applicants possible, regardless of my personal college status. As a parent, it's in my interest to have any sort of college investment I might make to pay off. As a taxpayer, it's in my best interests to get the best return for our government investment.
To put this entire debate in terms of whether the person speaking has attended college or not is really stretching logic a bit too far. Lots of other reasons to evaluate a college education one way or another.
I think you're walking a fine line here. Especially with this sour grapes remark, it almost seems as if you're saying "these folks didn't get/enjoy college. This is the reason they say what they do. Therefore their opinion is biased and you needn't listen to them."
Sticking somebody in a bucket and then explaining away everything they might say because of the bucket they're in? Sounds to me like one of those logical fallacies everybody loves to quote so much.
I don't know if it has, but based on said language, I'd be surprised if it hadn't.
My perspective: Having gone to CMU CS, which on the one hand doesn't have particular brand recognition outside CS, but on the other hand is fairly good at CS as undergrad programs go, I believe I can say that I probably did get 100k and possibly even 200k of value out of the education, quite aside from the piece of paper. A lot of the teachers I had were really seriously excellent (and I don't say that lightly), and I wouldn't have been able to learn from teachers that good in that array of subjects (field theory, abstract algebra, robotics, cryptography, etc) as well in any other situation. Yes, I could have read wikipedia and the lkml and so on, but, having done both, classes from really really good teachers work better.
On the other hand, I think I got lucky not only in terms of the ratio of program strength to brand recognition, but also in which teachers I got within the university; if I had taken different classes in different semesters, I believe I could have done a lot worse. Not remotely all the teachers were good or even passable. And, I could easily imagine getting very little value out of the experience, and I bet a lot of people, particularly ones at big-brand institutions, do overpay for the education they get.
The point is, it's a complicated question. There clearly is some value in some undergrad programs, and there also clearly is a problem with rising prices. Comparing it to a con scheme is not really doing it justice.
As a credential, it's very well known in tech-heavy industries and will help open doors there. Further, it's a good enough school that it will help open doors if you decide to pursue a graduate degree in the future.
As an experience, you got the opportunity to work with top professors and it sounds like you actively sought them out to get those experiences. Further, you almost certainly got to know a lot of students and if you were smart, reliable and hard-working, likely created a situation that could open professional opportunities in the future.
I'll concede that the correlation between a conferred degree and the value captured by the student is not perfect, and that a degree is not the only opportunity to capture value between the ages of 18 and 22. But I largely believe the "debate" consists largely of overblown, hyperbolic rhetoric and oversimplification.
I'll just note here that this statement appears to be true of every conceivable activity. Every person either did do it--in which case they're either glad or they regret it (or they're indifferent; we could express their satisfaction with a real number)--or they didn't do it, in which case they probably would like to feel that they made the right choice--and "didn't miss anything important" is a way of saying this.
Hmm, I should probably add the stipulation that it must be difficult to change your decision and do the activity. Otherwise there's no possibility of regretting missing it, 'cause then you'd just go and do it.
If I succeed, I will tell people that I did so in spite of not going to college, not because I didn't go.
It's not wrong for me to say that college wasn't for me. I'm only slightly less of an arrogant, self-important know-it-all outspoken jackass than I used to be; but I can, and do, express regret that I never got those qualities under control enough to go to college and come back out with a degree.
Also: I believe guys from those categories have a right to be informed about the outcome of them all.
To me one important part of higher education is to meet people, make long lasting contacts, and this article is missing that.
I don't get this. Although I'm not a big fan of the higher education system, a degree from an accredited institution implicitly asserts that you have received a passing grade in the relevant courses, whether that is determined by exams, project work, or whatever. That's why accreditation is such a big deal; a degree from an unaccredited school is heavily discounted in the employment marketplace.
Instead of a lecturer being the 5000th person trying to teach the subject with a varying degrees of preparedness, you just get the single best and most enthusiastic lecture of all time, everytime, as a video. Then in class teachers, TAs, and students can have normal humans conversations with each other to work through problems and peer interaction to motivate learning. Instead of this being relegated to additional office hours\recitations\labs.
Here's a blog from Los Altos which is using Khan Academy for some 5th (and 7th I believe) classes:
How would one grade this effectively though?
However, if this is the case, I don't think it's realistic to expect the standard of college graduates to be on par with what they were a generation ago or whenever she went to college, simply because there are so many more of them now, and college students are no longer mostly people who have self selected as unusually interested in learning/furthering their education and, for the most part, affluent.
She graduated in 2006.
"The U.S. gets a lot of bad press for the failures of its education system, and some of the supporting data is frightening. A study by the Department of Education found that 30 million adults in the U.S. are functionally illiterate. Another Department of Ed report ranks the U.S. at 35 out of 57 countries for mathematics literacy among 15-year-olds.
But when it comes to higher education, no one on Earth does better than the U.S., according to a new study by Times Higher Education (THE), a London magazine that tracks the higher ed market. Its 2010-'11 annual World University Rankings is dominated by U.S. schools. They hold 72 places among the world's top 200, including all the top five. Great Britain is a distant second, with 29 universities making the cut." (from Forbes http://www.forbes.com/2010/09/16/world-best-universities-ran...)
If your a prof and you have two offers (let's stay technical as it's HN):
1 Cambridge - £90,000/year (~$160,000) and you can go and watch the boat race (yay)
2 MIT (or caltech, berkley, princeton etc etc) - $400,000/year and you can live somewhere where it doesn't rain for 10 months of the year
Now which would you choose?
NB - figures pulled out of my ass, but I suspect that the ratio is probably accurate enough (ie US unis can afford to pay 2* UK).
One of my professors talked about the day he hoped the UK system would allow universities to become private institutions (they're quasi-private now in that 'foreign' students are charged a lot more than 'home/EU' students where the fees are capped)
An "asset bubble" has certain characteristics, none of which is really present for higher education -- mostly, it's not an asset in any usual sense because I can't flog off my B.Sc. to some eighteen-year-old for a hundred grand. Asset bubbles are marked by prices being driven up by speculation followed by a crash... since there's no speculation there's no bubble.
Now, if instead of asking "is there a higher education bubble" you want to ask the question "Is higher education overpriced" then you might be onto something. It's better to ask a more specific question though, since prices of degrees from different universities vary from nothing to craploads. It's like asking "Are cars overpriced?" without distinguishing between Bugattis and Kias.
Certainly at the high end of the market you're likely to find some overpricing, because that's what always happens at the high end of the market. A Bugatti really doesn't have many practical advantages over a Kia for the average commuter.
So, in conclusion, some people are paying too much for their university degrees and getting lousy value for money, while others are getting the deal of a lifetime. All I can say is do some research, choose wisely, and don't get blinded by the prestige of a big name if you can't afford it.
It's not like the classic investment bubble since the investment in completely illiquid outside of purchase - making it a one way market. Also, education's affect on the majority of the people wasn't as beneficial as they were led to believe - therefore the "collapse" of this bubble won't kill those who've invested. Instead, it's going to hurt those who are directly/indirect selling assets into this one-way market: school, publishers, etc. when the population decreases demand.
In the mortgage crisis there was a sell-off bubble, but here this isn't relevant since there was never the possibility of liquidity except by extra "rents" generated by getting better jobs.
What actual concrete alternatives are there for alarmed students (such as myself) that read these types of posts, jump through all the hoops, and still face a massive bill from Podunk U to get a BS or BA?
Most of you all here have already gone through the rites and work at cushy tech or office jobs, and a few rebels with their own startups.
What do you say to an incoming college freshman who isn't sure if he sees the light at the end of the tunnel or a $40K+ train barreling at him?
It's nice to say work hard, network, go to a cheap state school, go to a 2 year community college first then transfer, etc...but this all seems to point a really broken system with little to no solutions in sight for those actively under the guillotine of crushing debt.
Instead of pontificating, does anyone have actionable tips or advice?
1) Have a plan. Go into college with a measurable goal. Say "I'm going to get a degree in X, because that will help me get into my desired profession". Don't say "I'm going to go to become a well rounded person".
2) Get a useful degree. Generally, a useful degree is something that is technical, pays well after school, and doesn't require a masters / pHD. Things like Engineering, CS, Physics. Law and Medicine used to be good career paths, but I wouldn't recommend them anymore.
3) Don't assume the school will teach you everything you need to know. Instead, treat it as one source of knowledge among many. Learn about your major outside of school. Build things on your own. Get internships. Test out of easy classes. Intentionally take harder classes, or classes that would be harder to learn on your own after you've graduated.
Also take all the lab courses associated with your major - they will give you more tacit knowledge, knowledge of how things actually work, than theory courses.
Note, I'm mostly self-taught (including calculus), these are the kind of things I wish I had learned in school when I was there.
There is a technical snobbery that demeans all 'art' as useless and elevates all technical degrees to, IMO, an unworthy height.
Your definition of useful seems to be 'produces economic value to the graduate'. Another person could have a very different definition of useful.
Taking the point back on-topic, if your view of education is something that allows you to earn more during your working life, then I can understand some people questioning it.
I enjoy learning for its own sake, not for some bauble held out in front of me - maybe that's because I'm wealthy enough (relatively speaking) to have been able to study what I like without worrying about practical issues.
I live in a country where people see education (typically business degrees and technical subjects) as a means to an end - quite rightly as often their families have sold everything they own to be able to afford to send one child to get a 'good education' and then expect that child to be able to support the family in the future.
I teach undergrad IT, so I do have a dog in this particular 'education isn't worth it' fight. /rant off
What I did strongly imply is that spending $50-100k and four years of your life is a big decision.
Please, get a degree in whatever you like, but realize that you are probably in the minority for being able to receive education "for fun". Most people do it for an improvement in their earnings.
The issue isn't "my" view of education, but the mainstream view, pushed by the US gov't and all universities. I'm sick of the lie that a degree in Russian Lit or Communications will somehow prepare you for the workplace, or provide skills that will help you earn more. I'm sick of people being told to get a degree in whatever strikes their fancy, while strongly implying that any degree is good for them.
My three short bits of general advice to anyone in your stage of life are:
1) Relax and enjoy life
2) Try to differentiate yourself in a positive light as much as possible (both on and off paper).
3) Keep on seeking the answers like you are doing right now. You can never get what you don't ask for. Don't limit yourself by not asking for things.
This post, on the other hand, smells more like baseless weltschmerz. It's the kind of stuff I used to hear all day long while I was getting my education in liberal arts, from both students and professors: universities aren't what they used to be, we should get all the stupid people out, it's gotten so easy I could do this in my sleep (after which those same students proceed to get barely passing degrees, "because why would I bother going for more in an environment like this"), universities have become slave to the industry, and so on and so on.
I like a bit of random pessimism and carping as much as the next guy, but I kind of thought most people were smart enough to realize that the whole "universities have lost their soul" thing was just a fun shtick rather than the actual state of things. Apparently not.
how can you not treat it as a market-driven commodity when a 4 year college degree can cost $120K ?
And having spent time at various universities in various different countries I gotta tell you that the existence of a lot more money floating around the average US university certainly helps a lot.
Were universities always a mediocre way to get an education? By today's standards - yes. The thing is, "mediocre" is a relative term.
This is part of the reason I wrote How Universities Work, or: What I Wish I’d Known Freshman Year: A Guide to American University Life for the Uninitiated -- http://jseliger.com/2010/09/26/how-universities-work-or-what... , which I give to my freshmen every semester.
From my own experience (I'm a sophomore studying computer science, physics, and math at MIT), nobody assumes that their brand-name degree will automatically get them a job. The most lucrative jobs for CS involve interviews that grill you relentlessly regardless of what your educational background is. For the most part, people are here to learn about science and engineering that interests them, while at the same time hoping to get a job with what they've learned.
MIT helps a lot with this by being very flexible about what classes you can take. Prerequisites are all soft, and there is no credit limit. A lot of this may not generalize, but for a motivated student I think college is absolutely not a waste of time.
It is true that education is more commoditized - more people go to college and there is greater opportunity to obtain education - but commoditization by itself does not mean a decrease in quality. Because it is now a commodity, brand name means much more.
Many people at MIT drop out to start companies or work at startups. I don't know how common this is at other schools, but at MIT, "so-and-so dropped out to work full-time at his startup" is not an unusual thing to hear. It seems to me that students value their degrees less than society does.
The Universities aren't on the hook for these loans, which makes it even worse than the housing crisis. The students are on the hook, but they won't be able to pay them back, which means it will fall on the US taxpayer's shoulders to bail everybody out. The solution would be to stop issuing these cheap loans to all but the most qualified students entering into the most useful fields (science/engineering and not art-history/sports medicine). Once the money party stops, Universities will be forced to lower their prices, and cheaper education will become more prevalent as smaller institutions scramble to fill the huge increase in demand for cheap, effective education.
But no, we have a "right to education." Sigh.
By these criteria, my education sucks. But it's been the best decision I ever made. I think that in these reoccurring debates, HN is overlooking a broad, challenging, great books-based liberal arts education like the one I'm in. By refusing to teach "technical" skills that are better learned on the job anyway, and instead actually building the strength of the mind, for the sole sake of, as John Newman said, the sake of it, liberal arts places itself in the unique position of external to current industry trends. They'll teach you to learn, and leave the technical training to you once you graduate.
What an excellent read. The challenge is to see if the system can be reformed at all (most likely not) and to concentrate on building up alternatives that are more meaningful.
Take somebody like me, who's been out of school for 15 years. I know how dumb I am; it's a measured quantity and unfortunately has an observable and accelerating rate of growth.
My qualifications: I hold a Ph.D. in some topics in applied math from a world class research university. Before the Ph.D. I taught math in one university and computer science in another. After my Ph.D. I was a professor in an MBA program at a Big Ten university and a research scientist in an industrial computer science lab. Now I'm an entrepreneur.
There are two collections of 'knowledge' that are dangerous:
First, there is the knowledge you don't know but you should and should consider using.
Second, is the knowledge you do know but shouldn't and should never use.
Of these two dangers, in practice by far the worst is the second.
My view is that the most important lesson in college is to learn to detect and reject the second of these two dangers.
Next most important is to give you the background and practice in learning so that you can acquire knowledge to get around the first danger.
Next, broadly, there is a big, huge challenge in the world, life, careers, etc. -- doing well with things that are new.
Here is a bold, blunt, fact of life that illustrates the challenge and importance of doing well with things that are new:
A 'career' usually has to last from a person's 20s to their 60s. We may raise that to a person's 70s. So, that's over 40 years of working and maybe 50 years, half a century.
It might be nice to get an education for a 'good job', get such a 'job' in a 'good organization', and hold that good job for one's entire career. But a blunt fact is that so far the number of such jobs, that is, that will last over 40 years, have been only a very tiny fraction of the total number of jobs. None of IBM, GE, GM, AT&T have been able to provide many such jobs. It's not at all clear that Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Facebook, or Twitter will either.
So, during those 40+ years, there will be a lot of changes, and nearly everyone will have to keep up with the changes, with the things that are new. This is important but a challenge.
So, there is essentially no way college or anything else can get you ready for 'a good job' that will last 40+ years if only because such jobs are so rare. So, instead, college can try to get you ready to keep up with things that are new for 40+ years.
Some years ago on TV was an ad for an electronics trade school. They showed a happy graduate standing behind a box of electronics and saying, "Learn to play one of these babies, and you are fixed for life.". What was the box? Sure: It was a computer disk drive with a removable stack of disks, 14" in diameter, with total capacity about 14 million bytes. What a laugh.
So, in simple terms, first, college should teach you not what you need for a 'job' but how to keep up with things that are new for several jobs over 40+ years.
Second college might also teach you how to be a leader in things that are new, that is, be one who gets a lot of benefit from things that are new.
So, in working with things that are new, we come back to the two dangers, knowing things that are bad you should not use and not knowing things that are good you should use. So college should teach you how to separate these two and, for the second, how to learn. And, college might also teach you how to create good, new things you should use.
For how to separate, it is good to have some practice in some solid fields where we can separate relatively easily. Of course the crowning jewel of such fields is math with its theorems and proofs. Likely next is mathematical physics and then other physical sciences, engineering, etc. So, these fields can teach 'intellectual discipline', that is, some examples in at least those fields how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
All this is not very new but goes back to an old saying, "You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.". That is, he has obtained some good means for separating the wheat from the chaff and already knows a lot of the wheat and maybe how to create more.
Is Harvard the only source of such education? Not nearly! There are hundreds of colleges in the US where a good student can get a good education -- maybe the outline here will help them know what to look for and pursue. And there are a few dozen US research universities that can provide world class guidance in creating powerful, new knowledge.
How about idiot?
You might try to wipe your ass with your left hand and then stare at your fingers and try to find some meaningful direction in your life.
Hint: "You can always tell a XXXXX, but you can't tell him much" is a stock construction. It most certainly is not used to indicate that XXXXX has superior powers of reasoning.